Malthouse remounts Cloudstreet, brings Wake in Fright to the stage

Malthouse will stage Underground Railroad Game in 2019. Credit:Cade Martin

Malthouse Theatre will next year mount a revamped production of Tim Winton’s Australian classic Cloudstreet, which first graced our stages 20 years ago.

And theatregoers will sit through 20 years in the lives of the Pickles and the Lambs - in a choice of two separate outings or one epic five-hour sit-in, including a dinner break and interval.

Dan Wyllie in the original Cloudstreet production.Credit:George Fetting

Originally adapted by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo, the remount, announced this week for Malthouse’s 2019 season, has been “updated” by Monjo to better reflect 21st century politics - including a new opening, said Malthouse Theatre artistic director Matthew Lutton, who will direct the production.

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However, the amendments were just “drawing other [existing] elements out” of Winton’s book, he said.

“We’re looking at it through a different, contemporary lens … For example, in the previous production there was only one Indigenous actor so it limited the whole range of ways that we could tell [the story].”

Zahra Newman will perform a one-woman stage version of Kenneth Cook's Wake In Fright.Credit:Zan Wimberley

Cloudstreet was originally produced by Sydney’s Company B Belvoir and Perth’s Black Swan Theatre in 1998 and was roundly praised by critics, with The Age saying it “hooked” the audience “into a dialogue that often touches the soul”.

This time it's Malthouse co-producing with Black Swan and it will cast actors from both states, including Natasha Herbert, Bert LaBonte, Guy Simon and Alison Whyte, with more to be announced.

They are on a national hunt for a young performer with an intellectual disability to play the character Fish.

Eamon Farren as Twin Peaks villain Richard Horne.

Also in Malthouse’s 2019 season is an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 science-fiction novel Solaris. Co-produced with the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, its drawcard is Eamon Farren, who starred in last year’s reboot of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

And another Australian classic, Kenneth Cook’s Wake In Fright, will make its way to the stage in an adaptation by Declan Greene. Zahra Newman, who took Australia by storm as Nabulungi in The Book of Mormon, will realise Cook’s vision of a blokey, alcohol-soaked outback hell in a one-woman performance.

Linda Cropper plays both bogan and bourgeois in Australian Realness.Credit:Zan Wimberley

Underground Railroad Game, a US black comedy focused on racial politics, will make its Australian debut, and Zoey Dawson’s Australian Realness, starring Linda Cropper, skewers the divisions in our “classless” society.